Getting started in content marketing may seem a daunting task. Indeed, many marketers simply skip it because they feel they just don’t have the time it takes.

Good news: you’ve got time! This blog post will give you the essential definition of content marketing and show you two quick and easy ways to get started. You’ll be content marketing in no time.

What is content marketing?Content marketing is publishing and promoting original blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks and infographics, created by you and your team, which provide useful information to your customers, without directly selling your product or service.

Why do it?

Relationship building: shows your customers you care about more than just getting their money; you care about them

Credibility: demonstrates your expertise and thought leadership in service of the customer, establishing your credibility as their trusted advisor

Awareness: gets your brand in front of more people, in more places, more often

Traffic: brings more people to your website to consume your great content

Intelligence gathering: you can learn about your prospects by asking them to fill out a form in exchange for valuable content downloads and to join your newsletter lists

Thought influencers and connectors – through email, social media, and live contact

Industry pundits

Journalists

Colleagues at partner companies

Two easy ways to get startedwith Content Marketing

1. Curation: Daily.Start by curating interesting posts from other sources and sharing or reposting them on your own pages on a daily basis. As people discover what you are reposting and see that it is interesting and useful to them, they’ll follow you so they can keep getting more such posts from you.

2. Short Blog Posts: Weekly.You don’t have to write a thesis paper to put out a blog post. Pick a specific topic you feel comfortable writing about, and just start writing. Your company is the expert in providing its product or service, so who better to give your target market advice relating to the needs you solve?

Example: I provide marketing services. The topic of the blog post you are reading right now came up in a client discussion recently. I know this is a relevant topic for many marketers who are new to content marketing, so I decided to write this post. (I hope you find it useful!)

Promote: every time you publish a blog post on your website, create a short teaser headline to promote it, and post the headline and a link back to your post on your company’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn company pages.

No place to publish your blog??? If you can’t yet easily add blog posts to your website, then at a minimum, publish your own original content on a blogging platform like Medium, and/or on your LinkedIn and Facebook company pages (they can be posted right in your feed, or as downloadable PDFs).

Ideally, you’ll migrate your site to a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, which will allow you to easily publish new blog pages whenever you like (WordPress happens to be our preferred CMS). We’ll talk about CMSs in a subsequent blog post.

If you simply curate interesting social media posts and publish your own blog posts at the frequency suggested above, you’ll quickly increase brand awareness, credibility and traffic to your website.

Next The web is full of great articles and resources to help you grow into an expert content marketer (many published by content marketers themselves). And of course, if you ever want to talk content marketing with us, we’re always happy to chat about one of our favorite subjects.